The present invention relates to a container management technique and, more particularly, to a technique suitable for managing containers to be used for transferring cells sampled from a patient in a hospital, from the hospital to a culture center, or for transferring cells cultured in the culture center, from the culture center to the hospital.
Regenerative medicine has been attracting attention, in which a patient is treated by utilizing cells sampled from the patient and then cultured. In this regenerative medicine, the sampling of the cells and the treatment with the cultured cells are performed in the hospital, but the culture of the cells is performed in the specified culture center. This makes it necessary to transfer the sampled cells and the cultured cells between the hospital and the culture center. In regenerative medicine, therefore, individual management of cells (management of correspondences between the sampled cells and the cultured cells) and status management (management of the cell storing environment) are important.
The individual management technique for the cells is described in Japanese Patent Laid-open Publication No. 2004-119 and Japanese Patent Laid-open publication No. 2004-73187.
In the technique described in Japanese Patent Laid-open Publication No. 2004-119, each time a cell is transferred from one Petri dish to another, the ID numbers attached to the Petri dishes before and after the transfer are read out by a reader and are correlated to each other so that they may be managed in a database. Thus, a correspondence can be made between the patient and the cultured cells contained in the Petri dish.
In the technique described in Japanese Patent Laid-open Publication No. 2004-73187, the Petri dish, as used for transferring the sampled cells from the hospital to the culture center, and the Petri dish, as used for culturing the sampled cells, are correlated in a unit. Thus, the correspondence can be made between the patient and the cells which have been cultured from the cells of that patient.
On the other hand, a technique for managing the status of the cells or the like is described in Japanese Patent Laid-open Publication No. Hei 6-80503. In the technique described in Japanese Patent Laid-open Publication No. Hei 6-80503, a container which transfers an organ or the like is equipped with a sensor to monitor the environmental change in the container.
The container which transfers the cells needs the aforementioned configuration for managing the status of the cells is generally expensive. It is, therefore, preferable that few containers be used to transfer the cells between the hospitals and the culture center. However, it is not simple to perform individual management in the transfer of the cells between the hospitals and the culture center. This is because, if identical patent IDs are prepared in different hospitals, it cannot be guaranteed on the culture center side that they belong to another patient.